‘MADAME CLAIRE’ could still be read in the dulled mosaic, circling the barely legible ‘MODES’. Now the two broad display windows, where headless Edwardian mannequins had once been stationed (hats shown on separate stands, like cakes), were barricaded with old furniture, the rough deal backs of wardrobes, tables stacked on tables, among which an individual item, a plaster bust of Beethoven or a real glass cake-stand, was sometimes artlessly exhibited to the public. Rob had never set eyes on Hector Chadwick himself – it was always Raymond he saw, if he was in the area, or if Raymond let him know he had something for him. The old Harrow houses yielded treasures, now and then, among the van-loads of almost unsaleable books that found their way into the shop and then on, into junk shops and musty charity stores all over North London.
Rob shoved open the door, and a leisurely bell rang, and then rang again, in a part of the shop that was out of view. The showroom, as Raymond called it, was partitioned by ramparts of furniture into gloomy alleys, and it was hard to tell if there was anyone else in it. Not much natural light got through, and lamps that were notionally for sale glowed here and there on desks and sideboards. The feeling of secrecy and safety was shadowed by a childish sense of unease. At the back was a wall of books Rob had sometimes looked over, torn wrappers, dun- coloured cloth, obscure possibilities, the wary flicker of excitement snuffed out, as often as not, in the odour of dust and disuse. The smell of the books was like a drug, a promise of pleasure shot through with a kind of foreknown regret. In dreams he clambered or floated up bookshelves like these, where indefinably significant copies of editions that never existed hid among themselves in shy dull colours, old greens and ochres and faded yellows. Undeveloped prototypes for books, the novel by Woolf of which only one copy was printed, the unknown Compton-Burnett with its ever-mutating title,
‘Hey, Rob?’ There was the clatter of his keyboard. ‘With you in a sec.’ Raymond and his computer lived together in intense co-dependency, as if they shared a brain, his arcane undiscriminating memory backed up on the machine and perpetually enlarged by it. Raymond himself was vast, in a cheerfully challenging way. What his life was like beyond the confines of the shop Rob had no idea. ‘Just uploaded a new thing for you.’
‘Oh yeah…?’
‘You’re going to like this one.’
‘Mm, I wonder.’
At the side of the shop, a chaotic cubicle made a kind of office. Rob grinned in over the heaped papers and coiling dusty cables at Raymond’s round face gleaming in the light from the screen; he bounced slightly on his office chair as he nodded. His reddish beard, grown long and wild like a martyr’s, spread out over his T-shirt, half-covering the slogan for his website, ‘Poets Alive! Houndvoice.com’, above an implausibly cheerful picture of W. B. Yeats. He looked up and nodded. ‘I’ve just done Tennyson – want to see?’
On Houndvoice Raymond posted eerie little videos of long-dead poets reading, authentic sound recordings emerging from the mouths of digitally animated photographs. It was clear from the Comments that some viewers thought they were really seeing Alfred Noyes read ‘The Highwayman’, while even those who weren’t taken in were apparently impressed by the fish-like gaping of the poet’s lips and the rhythmical flicker of his eyebrows.
‘Yeah, I guess…’ said Rob, coming round as Raymond pushed back his chair. ‘They’re a bit spooky, aren’t they.’
‘Yeah?’ said Raymond, clearly pleased. ‘Yeah, I suppose people might be a bit spooked by them.’
Rob didn’t think the films were remotely convincing, but in a way this made them more disturbing. The dummylike dropping of the jaw, the cheesy melting and setting of the features, were like the evidence of other impostures – the doctored photos of early seances, more creepy and depressing to Rob than the thought of real communication with the dead. Rob met up with his dead friends in witty and poignant dreams, where they didn’t look at all like these bundles of mouthing matter. ‘Here we go,’ said Raymond, maximizing the player and whacking up the volume. Lord Tennyson’s notable head and shoulders filled the screen – hollow-cheeked, high-domed, hair tangled and greasy, the straggly dark beard with a lot of grey in it. The beard, at least, was a blessing, as it completely covered the poet’s mouth, preventing any ghoulish working of the lips. Raymond clicked the Play button and against a rainstorm of hissing and the galloping thump of the cylinder the determined quavering voice of the great poet began its familiar rush through ‘Come Into the Garden, Maud’. Rob had always thought the recording uncanny in itself – the effect whenever he’d heard it before was comic and touching and awe-inspiring by turns. He saw Raymond was watching him watch the video, and he smiled thinly, as if only just reserving judgement. The bard’s beard quivered like a beast in a hedge, as the famous face made repetitive mincing and chewing movements. Rob felt the peculiar look in the older Tennyson’s eyes, the air of almost belligerent anxiety, appealing to him critically and directly through the shame that was being inflicted on his lower features. Then it came to its abrupt end, and Raymond’s copyright line – not in the recording or the image, but in the puppet-show he’d made with them – appeared across Tennyson’s frozen face.
‘Almost incredible,’ Rob said, ‘listening to a man read a poem he wrote a hundred and fifty years ago.’
‘Ah – yes,’ said Raymond, seeing this rather skirted the issue.
Rob stood back. ‘I suppose that’s the earliest you can go, isn’t it,’ with a quick grasp for reassurance. ‘That must be the earliest recording of a poet.’
‘Well, strictly speaking,’ said Raymond, ‘though of course you can fake the voices, if you want to,’ peeping at Rob with that strange look, in a middle-aged man, of a teenager trying his luck.
‘Oh, for god’s sake,’ said Rob.
‘No, a bit naff, perhaps.’ Raymond shielded his feelings with a genial-sounding change of subject. ‘So what can I do for you, Rob?’
Rob narrowed his eyes. ‘You said you might have something for me…’
‘Oh, yes… Yes, indeed.’ Raymond swivelled his chair and peered bemusedly around the office – a moment’s teasing to cover his excitement. He raked his beard as his eyes ran over the shelves. ‘I thought, this is quite up Rob’s street… if I can only find it. Oh, I know, I put it in my naughty drawer’ – and leaning forward over himself, Raymond tugged open the bottom drawer of a filing-cabinet. The naughty drawer was where he kept things he didn’t want the Harrow schoolboys to find, in their occasional lingering searches in the more hidden parts of the shop. Sometimes a house clearance turned up a stash of girlie mags or even muscle mags which by now were antique collectibles in themselves. Raymond was the mere dealer – to Rob’s eye he seemed to survey an old
‘Nothing whatever.’ Rob saw that the book had a clasp, a lockable diary, perhaps; on the front, under Raymond’s thumb, an embossed gold H.
‘No…’ Raymond nodded. ‘Quite an interesting character. Died in the sixties. Businessman, art collector – left some stuff to the V and A?’ Rob shook his head obligingly. ‘Lived up the road – Harrow Weald. Big house called Mattocks, sort of Arts and Crafts. Never married,’ said Raymond reasonably.
‘I get the picture.’
‘Lived with his sister, who died in the mid-seventies. After which Mattocks became an old people’s home. Closed down a few years ago – place boarded up, kids got in, a bit of vandalism, not too bad. Now about to be demolished.’
‘I assume Hector’s been over it…?’
‘There wasn’t much left.’
‘No, well, those old folks…’
Raymond grunted. ‘Thieves got the best stained-glass windows. Hector salvaged a fireplace or two. But there was a strong-room no one had got into, which didn’t hold Hector back for long. Nothing valuable in it, apparently, just papers and stuff from Hewitt’s days.’
‘Including what you have in your hand.’
Raymond passed it over – and as he did so the hinged brass bar of the lock dropped open. ‘We had to cut it, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh…’ It seemed to Rob a bit rum that a man who could unlock a strong-room had to take a hacksaw to a book. A handsome book, too, the inner border of the binding tooled in gold, thick gold on the page-edges, the
